The previous, current and future of girls in China’s oppressively patriarchal society is an enormous matter to handle in beneath 90 minutes, however Violet Du Feng’s unassuming however very shifting documentary Hidden Letters covers loads of floor.
Visually, it has the rapid, low-key digital-video look that’s more and more typical of pageant docs, and which can prohibit its viewers to the specialist circuit. However there’s quite a bit occurring beneath the floor in a movie that appears on the topic of Nushu, an historical secret language utilized by Chinese language girls to speak to one another with out their husbands, fathers, and even their sons figuring out.
“Nushu is usually about distress,” notes Hu Xin, a tour information on the Nushu Museum in Jiangyong County. Hu Xin is our port of entry into this secret world, depicting a time nonetheless in dwelling reminiscence when girls had been subordinate to males, foot-binding was widespread (as had been organized marriages), and divorces had been out of the query. From the despair got here Nushu, written on followers and handkerchiefs in delicate calligraphy or sung a capella and handed down by means of generations. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), these missives had been by no means about males: the topic, and viewers, was at all times the sisterhood.
After Hu Xin we meet Wu Simu, the previous’s protégée, who has been learning Nushu for some time. Wu Simu is engaged, and at first her fiancé seems to be a catch, an enlightened younger man from a tight-knit working-class household. In a brief house of time, nevertheless, he reveals himself as one thing of a monster, instructing Simu to desert her “passion” and tackle not one however two jobs so that they will purchase a home, cool down and have youngsters.
Simu is fortunate and jumps ship, however we discover out in a shock flip of occasions that Hu Xin is a divorcee who suffered by the hands of a equally controlling however abusive husband. Her feedback are actually stunning; regardless of all her honors and achievements, Hu Xin feels that she has failed as a lady, with no husband and no youngsters.
After this, two different tales come into the combo, one being the story of He Yanxin, the final historically educated practitioner of nushu. A frank, humorous and unsentimental lady, she forges a bond with Hu Xin, swapping tales that make the age hole between a millennial and an octogenarian merely vanish.
However similtaneously it explores Nushu’s previous, Du Feng’s movie has an amused eye on its future. Although the standard, gifted Hu Xin appears to be the proper model ambassador for Nushu, her bosses—all male—undercut her at each flip, undermining her confidence and speaking within the inane lingo of gross sales patter, mooting cross-platform promotions and even KFC offers. The irony will not be misplaced on the director, who presents these toe-curling moments with out remark.
In contrast to the vast majority of docs, Hidden Letters doesn’t actually set itself a purpose—it’s extra of a mosaic piece that, in its finest moments, has the vérité really feel of a late-’60s Maysles brothers film, notably an intimate scene wherein Simu sits down together with her future sisters-in-law, who communicate candidly about marriage and sacrifice. In consequence, all of it ends relatively abruptly, however it actually achieves what it units out to do, which is current historical past throughout the context of lived expertise, utilizing Nushu as a metaphor for the necessity for communication and connectivity between girls who need their lives to have that means.
